Can I save a numpy array as a 16-bit image using "normal" (Enthought) python?

Is there any way to save a numpy array as a 16 bit image (tif, png) using any of the commonly available python packages? This is the only way that I could get to work in the past, but I needed to install the FreeImage package, which is a little annoying.

This seems like a pretty basic task, so I would expect that it should be covered by scipy, but scipy.misc.imsave only does 8-bits.

One alternative is to use pypng. You'll still have to install another package, but it is pure Python, so that should be easy. (There is actually a Cython file in the pypng source, but its use is optional.)

Update: I recently created a github repository for a module called numpngw that provides a function for writing a numpy array to a PNG file. The repository has a setup.py file for installing it as a package, but the essential code is in a single file, numpngw.py, that could be copied to any convenient location. The only dependency of numpngw is numpy.

Here's a script that generates the same 16 bit images as those shown above: